REDMOND, Wash., Sept. 16, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Microsoft
Corp. (Nasdaq "MSFT") on Tuesday announced that Microsoft Dynamics
CRM 2015, as well as updates to its Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online
and Microsoft Dynamics Marketing services, will be generally
available in the fourth quarter of 2014.
The new updates revolutionize the way sellers and marketers
unite and collaborate by bringing outside-in insights to sales and
marketing professionals so they can understand the impact of their
campaigns to customers, giving them more personalized experiences.
Salespeople now have the visibility to impact campaigns and
targeting with unprecedented insight into marketing calendars and
campaigns. The updates also enable marketers to more effectively
plan and execute marketing campaigns and better track their impact,
while strengthening synergies with the sales process. Microsoft
Dynamics CRM continues to deepen its interoperability with
Microsoft's leading productivity applications, including Microsoft
Office 365, Yammer, Lync, Skype, SharePoint and Power BI for Office
365.
The new release is designed to address ongoing needs for
businesses to collaborate among different divisions and groups to
better take advantage of opportunities and to meet the evolving
needs of their customers.
According to Ray Wang, principal
analyst, founder and chairman at Constellation Research Inc.,
"Closing the gap between marketing and sales is required for a
successful customer experience. Organizations need tools to track
the customer interactions from marketing to sales and back,
collaborate on leads and opportunities, and measure the metrics
that matter to both sales and marketing."
"Unlike vendors that want to separate businesses by selling them
countless different clouds and solutions, we have designed
Microsoft Dynamics CRM to facilitate the kind of collaboration that
businesses need to thrive and grow," said Bob Stutz, corporate vice president, Microsoft
Dynamics CRM. "This means that marketers and sellers can work more
closely together to engage customers, bridging the chasm between
marketing, sales and service to truly deliver end-to-end
experiences that customers will love."
Uniting marketing and sales
To break down the silos between sales and marketing, Microsoft
Dynamics Marketing introduces the new Sales Collaboration Panel,
which allows sellers to provide input into campaigns and targeting.
The release also gives marketers the ability to streamline campaign
creation and improve segmentation with graphical email editing, A/B
testing, integrated offers and approval workflows. Marketers can
more effectively collaborate with the click-to-call feature in Lync
and easily schedule and execute webinars as part of their marketing
initiatives. The new Interactive Marketing Calendar allows
marketers to visualize and manage their end-to-end marketing plans.
Microsoft Dynamics Marketing will also be available in Japanese and
Russian.
In addition to providing salespeople with the ability to more
effectively collaborate with marketing, the new release of
Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides the ability to recommend products
to up-sell and cross-sell across product families, improving their
selling effectiveness. The new release enhances the Guided Sales
Processes to help steer sellers toward desired outcomes and ensure
the enforcement of business rules across all devices. New mobile
sales capabilities across mobile platforms increase productivity
with flexible RoleTailored dashboards and analytics, as well as
personalized home pages.
Continuing to enhance capabilities to Microsoft Social
Listening, the company added Italian as a sixth native language for
sentiment tracking and analysis and expanded listening capabilities
to include news sources. These capabilities give people access to
real-time insights so they can see what is happening and make the
right decisions to take advantage of opportunities the moment they
arise.
Expanding into new markets, Microsoft announced that Microsoft
Dynamics CRM Online is available for purchase in 17 new markets in
Latin America on Tuesday, making
the service globally available in more than 65 markets worldwide.
The company confirmed that the global expansion of Microsoft CRM
Online will continue and is expected to reach over 130 markets and
in 44 languages by the end of calendar year 2014. The company,
which recently announced the opening of a Brazil datacenter to service the Latin
American region, also noted that in calendar year 2015, Microsoft
Dynamics CRM Online would expand into additional Microsoft regional
datacenters. More capabilities and features of the new Microsoft
Dynamics CRM 2015 and Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, such as
productivity improvements, automated business processes and
real-time forecasting data, are detailed in the Release Preview
Guide. A blog post series by Bob
Stutz is available on CRM Connection. In addition, all can
follow and engage with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM community
@MSDynamicsCRM at http://www.twitter.com/msdynamicscrm,
#MSDYNCRM.
About Microsoft Dynamics
At the heart of every successful business are the people who
make things happen. Microsoft Dynamics designs modern business
solutions that empower individuals with intuitive tools that allow
them to do their best work. Our proactive, easy-to-use business
applications adapt to the way people and systems work, enabling
businesses to rapidly deploy and be forward-looking in an
ever-changing world.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT") is the worldwide
leader in software, services, devices and solutions that help
people and businesses realize their full potential.
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SOURCE Microsoft Corp.